Thanks to Bernie V, for this very cool story!
The Grand National to end all Grand Nationals!
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The iconic Buick GNX poster….
I wasn’t privy to how this was created back in the day.
We had an extremely talented illustrator and graphic designer, Gil Davenport (R.I.P), who left our illustration group to join Buick Special Products under Mike Doble.
He got us some of these posters as soon as they were available just before the GNX public reveal.
Not everyone in my group was interested so I took the remaining copies.
Now the rest of the story….
Gary Smith was the photographer for the Buick GNX project.
He was tasked with capturing an image of a Turbo Regal doing a smoky burnout as the concept for this poster.
Due to the lead time required to get this poster made for the GNX intoduction, and the fact that they had no pre-production GNXs built yet, they scheduled a regular GN for the shoot.
The photographer usually had a driver assigned to him.
This day the driver couldn’t make it.
So the photographer asked Chuck Jensen if he would want to do it.
Talk about best day at work!
Chuck stepped up and did an amazing burnout that was captured for this iconic poster.
The GNX grille badge was edited in.
At the end of the shoot there was so much smoke you couldn’t see the car.
Chuck stepped out and walked through the cloud of tire smoke and Gary wasn’t prepared – otherwise he would have taken the shot- that would have been cool.
I gave Chuck one of my extra posters yesterday so he could use his original one for signatures at his upcoming retirement celebration.
We’ll deserved Chuck Jensen !!!!
It was great meeting up again!
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